The present invention generally relates to methods and devices for preparing medicinal capsules and more specifically to medicinal capsule preparation methods and devices with improved closing and ejection pins.
The mass production of medicines, supplements, and other compounds in predefined doses has become an important part of the health care and exercise industries. Many of these doses come prepackaged inside a two-piece, hard gelatin or cellulose capsule. Such a capsule may be easier to administer to a patient when compared to other forms of doses, and the capsules may be more readily produced by a mass production manufacturing facility.
The conventional process for the production of a medicinal capsule involves putting the two empty halves of the capsule in a pressing rack, filling the lower capsule half with powdered or some other form of medicine, and pressing or squeezing the two capsule halves together until they are frictionally locked. The current devices for holding and pressing these capsule halves together may suffer from various undesirable problems.
The present invention broadly contemplates, in at least one presently preferred embodiment, a method and apparatus for packaging a measured dose of a medicinal or other material in a container. More specifically, one embodiment of the present invention includes a device for squeezing two halves of a medicinal capsule together and ejecting the capsule from the capsule preparation device.
In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, the capsule production device may include one or more hollow closing pins that may be used to press the two halves of the capsule together into frictional contact with each other. The closing pins may be removably secured to a pin plate and may be chamfered at the capsule end to reduce the local force on any one area of the capsule to be squeezed.
In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a pin plate that holds one or more closing and/or ejection pins may be mounted to an actuating shaft that is capable of forcing the pins into contact with the capsules to be formed along a vertical axis through the center of the capsules. The pin plate and shaft may have matching non-rotational profiles so that a horizontal force on the device may not produce a twisting, bending, or slipping of the pin plate in relation to its rotational position in the actuating shaft. The pin plate may be secured to the actuating shaft by way of a set screw inserted through the upper portion of the actuating shaft.
These and other details, objects, and advantages of the present invention will be more readily apparent from the following description of the presently preferred embodiments.